Supporting expertise awareness: finding out what others know

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach to solve the problem of missing transparency of competencies within virtual organizations. We based our work on empirical studies to cope with the problem of competence finding in distributed organizations. Former studies have shown that central storage of expertise profiles is inappropriate due to missing flexibility and high costs of maintenance. The focus of our approach is to support peripheral awareness to become aware of the available competences in organizations. Our approach runs along two lines: making expertise-related communication visible for all members of an organization and visualizing competence-indicating events in collaboration infrastructures. We verified this approach by the evaluation of a prototypical implementation.